![\"\u00c9douard](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/REP_DC_MASP_00129_01-1_1-1024x834.jpg\")
\u00c9douard Vuillard, The Flowered Dress, 1891. Photography by CABREL | Escrit\u00f3rio de Imagem.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\u00c9douard Vuillard, The Flowered Dress, 1891. Photography by CABREL | Escrit\u00f3rio de Imagem.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the Critics\u2019 Table\u2019s first Speed Round. Never before have our contributors agreed so readily to an assignment. One sentence? No problem! (And from Vuillard to Victor Van, their picks are as varied as their definitions of \u201cone sentence.\u201d) To map our picks and plan your route, enter the Critic\u2019s Table hashtag #TCT in the search bar of the See Saw<\/a> app.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHELSEA \/ WEST VILLAGE Skarstedt | 247 West 25th Street The show includes one of the painter\u2019s most famous, most deeply influential and profound works: like the Gersaint shop sign is for Watteau, The Flowered Dess, 1891, is for Vuillard, \u201cadvertising\u201d another little big revolution: Intimism.\u2014David Rimanelli<\/p>\n Ralph Lemon, \u201cFrom Out of Space\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Paula Cooper | 521 West 21st Street For the artist, a keen reader of Benjamin, history appears as ruins, and ruins become a stage through which to fall: in a short, potent video shot in Money, Mississippi, cameras soar above the remnants of Bryant\u2019s Grocery and Meat Market, where 14-year-old Emmett Till met his end, scanning the Tallahatchie for his corpse and peering through rotten lace into his hearse.\u2014Ciar\u00e1n Finlayson<\/p>\n \u201cArt (by) Dealers\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n White Columns | 91 Horatio Street Charity pages: 93 works by dealers; blind buy,\u00a0500; name revealed @ purchase; polymarket af; I asked Gia if Anatoly was the sneakers.\u2014Whitney Mallett<\/p>\n Petzel | 520 West 20th Street The artist happened to be at the gallery when I came by, and she remarked that my dog, whose pale head was peeking from a dark bag, looks like she might have stepped out of one of the big works on paper on the walls around us, I think because of their shared black-and-white palette (the drawings are done with charcoal and white cont\u00e9 crayon, mostly), but also, maybe, because Tyson\u2019s semi-abstracted, sometimes comic, totemic figures\u2014odd couples, conjoined families, a self-portrait\u2014are animalian, not strictly humanoid, unknowable and wild beneath their housebroken charm.\u2014Johanna Fateman<\/p>\n Anne Truitt, \u201cWaterleaf\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Matthew Marks | 523 West 24th Street Twelve of what at first appear to be identically-scaled, imageless monochromes in slightly off-putting, off-pastel shades, ranging from buttercream to tawny apricot to damp rose to dusty lilac to dingy seafoam, redolent of nursery or hospital waiting room interiors, eventually reveal a similar cross form on square sheets of paper, whose rough edges lend the works an undulant object-quality, and which would be more effectively shown unframed, entering them into a fuller dialogue with the entire space and the artist\u2019s three, characteristically human-scaled, free-standing rectangular columns, each painted a much deeper, more vibrant color: egg yolk cadmium, brilliant ultramarine, and an almost blackish green.\u2014Jarrett Earnest<\/p>\n Paul Chan, \u201cAutoma Mon Amour\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Greene Naftali | 508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor In one standout work from his \u201cBreathers\u201d series, installed high on a wall, the neo-conceptualist creates a quasi-religious tableau akin to the Four Evangelists bringing the Good News from electric fans and vinyl fabric.\u2014David Rimanelli<\/p>\n Gladstone | 515 West 24th Street It\u2019s self-evident that these posthumous silver-gelatin blowups of some of Robert Mapplethorpe\u2019s most iconic images are justified by the logic of his work, that his pictures are even more powerful at this scale, because, above all, Mapplethorpe is our great visual philosopher of power, making adamantine emblems of the fucked-up power dynamics of desire, control, fame, beauty, etc.\u2014all inherent within the most basic photographer and subject, subject and object relationships\u2014and while it would be easier on everyone\u2019s nerves, not to mention their politics, if he just didn\u2019t do that, he did: here the photographs are again, stronger than ever, inescapable.\u2014Jarrett Earnest<\/p>\n Torbj\u00f8rn R\u00f8dland, \u201cBones in the Canal and Other Photographs\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n David Kordansky | 520 West 20th Street In a number of the artist\u2019s images here, his subjects (slender women, naked bodies, clowns) are lit from behind as if standing in front of a train or car headlights; their silhouettes\u2019 shimmering edges make the photos seem to glow from within and lend them a beautiful, eerie drama.\u2014Gracie Hadland<\/p>\n \u201cThe Lost Beauty of Humankind: Robert Bergman\u2019s Portraits in the Hill Collection\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Hill Art Foundation | 239 Tenth Avenue People are all different, although at certain levels of abstraction they may remarkably resemble one another, just as paintings and photographs may resemble each other in many ways while remaining importantly, fundamentally, different, however there is no way to tell except by putting things side by side and looking for yourself, and so, writer-theorist David Levi Strauss does exactly this, brilliantly, in curating an exhibition of Robert Bergman\u2019s lush photos of down-and-out people encountered on the street\u2014wrinkled, scabbed, looking back and away\u2014alongside a selection artworks, including a state-of-the-art reproduction of a Pontormo portrait (much better than a normal print, but in no way approximating the surface or experience of the real painted object), which is placed next to a Bergman image of a staring youth\u2014the similarities and differences can only be grappled with in real time and space, which is what exhibitions are supposed to do, make visual arguments in their own terms, which Strauss clearly understands and pulls off with deep feeling, and with the overall effect of an artwork itself.\u2014Jarett Earnest<\/p>\n UPTOWN Arts and Letters | Audubon Terrace Broadway between West 155 and 156 Streets The tomette floor pairs so well with the celadon curtain, it\u2019s hard to imagine both that this show was at the Walker without it and that Reaves\u2019s Frankenstein furniture won\u2019t forever excite me.\u2014Whitney Mallett<\/p>\n \u201cAfterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The Metropolitan Museum | 1000 Fifth Avenue Staged as a literal underbelly to what is sure to be a ticket- and money-printing exhibition of the great 16th-century \u201cinfluencer\u201d\u2014the museum\u2019s words, not mine\u2014Raphael, upstairs, contemporary works spanning the last few decades, including the recently late Melvin Edwards\u2019s welded steel evocation of lynching and Michael Aschenbrenner\u2019s blown-glass bones bound into splints with cloth and twigs, are densely clustered with artifacts of late Roman, Byzantine, and Coptic origin, forming an almost injuriously compact yet conceptually weighted exhibition stashed in a solemn brick gallery unearthed during the museum\u2019s structural renovation.\u2014Paige K. Bradley<\/p>\n Guggenheim Museum | 1071 Fifth Avenue No one has really killed it on the museum\u2019s central ramp since Hilma af Klint, whose paintings, commissioned by the spirit guide Amaliel, were, as luck would have it, meant for a spiral-shaped temple\u2014not until Carol Bove likewise answered the call from another realm (let\u2019s imagine) to do the rotunda up again, similar palette more or less, but this time in supple monuments and missives in pinched and draped steel.\u2014Johanna Fateman<\/p>\n Dorothea Rockburne, \u201cTime Measures Itself\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n David Nolan Gallery | 24 East 81st Street I once heard Dorothea Rockburne say, \u201cArt is language, don\u2019t make it do\u201d; this gathering of works, past and present\u2014she is 96\u2014centers on the perception of material and form, as if to also say \u201cnow is all we have,\u201d and even the scent her materials throw off keeps me grounded.\u2014Paige K. Bradley<\/p>\n Rachel Rose, \u201cThe Rest\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Gladstone | 130 East 64th Street` I hunched to peer into these small, capacious paintings that enchant the Hudson Valley by blurring representation with expressivity and myth\u2014the world seen through a devotional tear.\u2014Brian Droitcour<\/p>\n SOHO \/ TRIBECA Drawing Center | 35 Wooster Street Curator Lynne Cooke introduces the mesmeric genius of Ceija Stojka\u2014self-taught artist and survivor of the Romani Holocaust\u2014whose work, including images recalled from internments at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbr\u00fcck, transforms unspeakable atrocities into emanations of pure life force.\u2014Margaret Sundell\u00a0<\/p>\n Doron Langberg, \u201cLandscapes\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Deitch | 18 Wooster Street With triangulating sites\u2014in Israel, Ukraine, and Fire Island\u2014painted at the scale of Pollock and Delacroix, the artist, once and maybe forever a darling of queer figuration, now turns to landscape, exorcising the settler-colonial sublime in a nervy mix of registers: from the heart and the pit of the stomach, a searching illogic of reduction and distortion that stuns.\u2014Johanna Fateman<\/p>\n \u201cClaudio Perna: Idea Como Arte\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n ISLAA | 142 Franklin Street This show\u2019s reticent wall labels prove that\u2014without knowing the precise rules of Claudio Perna\u2019s game\u2014you can still relish the late Venezuelan Conceptual artist\u2019s photos, collaged maps, and scribbled notes, which together start to form an intriguing portrait both of a man and of his home country.\u2014Dawn Chan<\/p>\n Artists Space | 11 Cortlandt Alley Of course he shot with a medium-format Rolleiflex at the chest, the eyes tell it: let\u2019s look a moment longer, now at David, no, at Boris, Monica, Andrew, Ethan, Eduardo, Marcus; I still have your picture on my wall.\u2014Devan D\u00edaz<\/p>\n Eli Hill, \u201cInternal Weather\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Harkawik | 88 Walker Street The painter\u2019s melancholic portraits, drenched in cool blues and haunting reds, capture gay boys running on trails and slouching in chairs before mirrors, the works lovingly depicting the fraught competition of perception played out on sun-kissed Fire Island or in chilly Brooklyn apartments.\u2014Grace Byron<\/p>\n LOWER EAST SIDE Palo | 21 East 3rd Street In the front space, by the window, is a little cut-out graphite drawing of novelist Yukio Mishima peering down from a three-dimensional recreation of the brutalist balcony where he gave his failed speech to overthrow the Japanese government moments before committing seppuku in 1970, mounted to the wall like a puppet theater, high up, impotently addressing the rest of the works in the exhibition, which include a life-size drawing of Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix\u2019s tomb beneath a snaking cursive line (the David Bowie lyric that gives the show its title), in between a number of collaged objects and drawings of collaged objects that mine the thornier problems of \u201cqueer history,\u201d a precarious fantasia of which this artist is an elegant, hard-bitten analyst.\u2014Jarrett Earnest<\/p>\n Gelitin, \u201cAll for All\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Perrotin | 130 Orchard Street The mashup of relational aesthetics and Viennese Actionism had a heady appeal for biennial curators at the top of this century, but tastes have changed, and now the collective\u2019s playful and occasionally lewd modular garden-tile portraits are hawked as rustic tchotchkes for the red chip set.\u2014Brian Droitcour<\/p>\n dean erdmann, \u201cVitrum\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Company | 145 Elizabeth Street In the basement gallery, a dazzling and enigmatic glass ATV sits atop a small black stage, inflaming the viewer\u2019s machismo or masochism amidst a series of mechanical\u00a0parts and imagery frozen into casts and pictures.\u2014Grace Byron<\/p>\n Open Studio | 127 Henry Street With titles like\u00a0Unforgettable Thanksgiving Surprises at Walt Disney Resort,\u00a0IHOP Mexican Churro Pancakes, and\u00a0Wheel of Fortune 7000th Episode \u2013 New!, Victor Van\u2019s peppy\u00a0paintings on paper have the power to really turn your day around.\u2014Sam McKinniss<\/p>\n
\n\u201c\u00c9douard Vuillard: Early Interiors\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n
Through April 11<\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n![\"Installation](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/NTxxx6-1024x683.jpg\")
Installation view of Nicola Tyson\u2019s \u201cNEED\u201d at Petzel, 2026. Photography by Meg Symanow, courtesy of the artist and Petzel.
\nNicola Tyson, \u201cNEED\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n
Through April 18<\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/RM_BGG26_install_03b_e.jpg\")
Installation view of \u201cRobert Mapplethorpe\u201d at Gladstone. \u00a9 Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Photography by Anthony Flores, courtesy of the Foundation and Gladstone.
\n\u201cRobert Mapplethorpe\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through April 18<\/p>\n
Through April 25th<\/p>\n
Through April 11<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2026_Reaves_07-2-1024x768.jpg\")
Installation view of Jessi Reaves\u2019s \u201cprocess invented the mirror\u201d at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2026. Photography by Steven Probert Studio and courtesy of the artist.
\nJessi Reaves, \u201cprocess invented the mirror\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through July 3<\/p>\n
Through January 10, 2027<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Carol-Bove-exh_ph044-LARGE-JPG-1024x766.jpg\")
Installation view of \u201cCarol Bove\u201d at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Photography by David Heald and courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
\n\u201cCarol Bove\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through August 2<\/p>\n
Through April 18<\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/CS017-1024x1022.jpg\")
Ceija Stojka, Auschwitz 1944, 2009, \u00a9 2026. Image courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.
\n\u201cCeija Stojka: Making Visible\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through June 7<\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n
Through May 2<\/p>\n![\"Installation](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/19-scaled.jpg\")
Installation view of \u201cDavid Armstrong: Portraits\u201d at Artists Space, 2026. Image courtesy of the Estate of David Armstrong and Artists Space.
\nDavid Armstrong, \u201cPortraits\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through May 23<\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n
\n![\"Artwork](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Yuval_Pudik_2026_November_25th_1970_0634-1024x732.jpg\")
Yuval Pudik, November 25th 1970, 2026. Photography by Chris Herity, courtesy of the artist and Palo.
\nYuval Pudik, \u201cTime Takes a Cigarette\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through April 25<\/p>\n
Through April 11<\/p>\n
Through April 18<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/0797-1024x786.jpg\")
Installation view of Victor Van\u2019s \u201cGreat Expectations\u201d at Open Studio, 2026. Photography by Chris Herity, courtesy of the artist and Open Studio.
\nVictor Van, \u201cGreat Expectations\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
Through April 24<\/p>\n